Syria Uses Cyber Warfare to Attack Pro-Democracy Supporters

“The security forces of President Bashar Assad has moved ahead on multiple fronts. An estimated 10,000 people have been arrested and there are reports that some dissidents have been tortured to reveal their Facebook passwords. Foreign journalists have been banned from entering the country and access to the Internet and the mobile phone network has been curtailed.

Meanwhile, a shadowy group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has orchestrated an array of cyber attacks in three key areas: spamming popular Facebook pages, such as President Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of State, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Oprah Winfrey with pro-Assad propaganda; defacement attacks against Syrian opposition group websites, and defacement of Western websites.

“It’s the first case of an open, organized and orchestrated pro-government web attack group with a public presence on a national network in the Arab world,” explained Helmi Noman, a senior researcher with the OpenNet Initiative, a collaborative partnership between the Citizen Lab inside the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, the SecDev Group in Ottawa and the Berkman Center at Harvard University.”